Today is Banned Website Awareness Day, and all across the country, educators are doing their part to raise awareness of how overly restrictive blocking of educational websites affects student learning.

The dialogue around filtering must also include bring-your-own-device policies, appropriate use of social media in schools, and overall responsible use of technology in school. Each of these issues plays an important part in the equation that influences school policy around filtering websites. For example, do students and teachers use social media sites like Edmodo or even Facebook for class purposes? Are educational videos on YouTube part of teachers’ curriculum? In large school districts, does it make sense to have individual school policies? Are students allowed to use their cell phones?

Part of the investigation into what filtering policies to put in place revolves around understanding current rules and regulations — and that’s the problem, according to Michelle Luhtala, a librarian at New Cannan High School and one of the primary organizers of Banned Websites Awareness Day.

“People believe the rules are far more restrictive than they really are,” she said. “Most people are working off of policies that predate 2003, and so much has happened since then, and continues to happen.”

In a recent survey of nearly 700 teachers, principals, and school librarians, conducted by MMS Education and co-sponsored by edWeb.net and MCH Strategic Data, 55% of respondents said they had somewhat restrictive policies of access to Web 2.0 tools (social media sites) for teachers, and 23% said they had very restrictive policies. And when it came to students, 44% said they had somewhat restrictive policies of access, and 47% said they had very restrictive policies.

Most of the blocked sites are either social media sites, or have some element of public sharing of information, and that’s where school administrators need to be more flexible, Luhtala said. “Administration more than teachers need to open their minds to the value and potential of social networking for educational use,” wrote a survey respondent. “CIPA needs to be spelled out more specifically or made clearer to IT in education so that filters are not blocking sites unnecessarily.”

In the meantime, what should educators do when they try to access a site in school that’s blocked by the school’s filter? Luhtala offers the following advice.

1. PRESENT FACTS. Direct people to the Department of Education’s suggestions in this article (posted below). “This is a really valuable resource for tech directors who aren’t well informed about the details of legal aspects,” Luhtala said. “Sometimes IT directors tell other IT directors who say, ‘Just do what the lawyers say,’ and it becomes a giant case of the game Telephone. The DOE is the ultimate authority, so this article forces them to look at their agenda and policies.”
2. CONSIDER SMART POLICIES. Study CoSN’s Guide for Acceptable Use Policies for filtering and other issues, and their recent report Making Progress: Rethinking State and School District Policies Concerning Mobile Technologies and Social Media, which clearly states, “Before steps are taken to impose limits on the use of social media and mobile technologies in schools, policymakers and educators need to consider the consequences for learning that such restrictions would produce… Such action should carefully consider the advantages of social media for learning and that these guidelines for responsible use bring media into mentored environments where they can be safely explored and shared.”
3. CREATE A DIALOGUE. Start a conversation with people who manage the filtering system. “A lot of policies have been in place for 10 years or more,” Luhtala said. “Sometimes they assume products are inherently bad, but if they understand that they can be tools for learning, they can see constructive purposes.”
4. GET AN EARLY ADOPTER ON BOARD AND TAKE BABY STEPS. Collaborate with an innovator, and see if you can work on a project that includes a site you want unblocked. Get parent and school authorization to try out the pilot project and document the process along the way in order to share best practices. Try it out for five weeks and see how it goes.
5. USE AND SHARE RESOURCES. Read the American Association of School Librarian’s Essential Resources site and add your own resources to help others spread the message and educate other educators.
6. WADE INTO SOCIAL MEDIA. For those who have yet to start using social media with students, Luhtala suggests “take steps to try to understand what all the fuss is about.” But that will take time and training, as one survey respondent pointed out. “I believe it offers us potential opportunities to further engage our students. However, in order to maximize this potential we must provide teachers and students with additional trainings,” the anonymous respondent wrote in the survey.

When you’re ready to take action, here are the list of myths dispelled directly by the Department of Education’s Technology Director Karen Cator:

• Accessing YouTube is not violating CIPA rules. “Absolutely it’s not circumventing the rules,” Cator says. “The rule is to block inappropriate sites. All sorts of YouTube videos are helpful in explaining complex concepts or telling a story, or for hearing an expert or an authentic voice — they present learning opportunities that are really helpful.”
• Websites don’t have to be blocked for teachers. “Some of the comments I saw online had to do with teachers wondering why they can’t access these sites,” she says. “They absolutely can. There’s nothing that says that sites have to be blocked for adults.”
• Broad filters are not helpful. “What we have had is what I consider brute force technologies that shut down wide swaths of the Internet, like all of YouTube, for example. Or they may shut down anything that has anything to do with social media, or anything that is a game,” she said. “These broad filters aren’t actually very helpful, because we need much more nuanced filtering.”
• Schools will not lose E-rate funding by unblocking appropriate sites. Cator said she’s never heard of a school losing E-rate funding due to allowing appropriate sites blocked by filters. See the excerpt below from the National Education Technology Plan, approved by officials who dictate E-rate rules.
• Kids need to be taught how to be responsible digital citizens. “[We need to] address the topic at school or home in the form of education,” Cator says. “How do we educate this generation of young people to be safe online, to be secure online, to protect their personal information, to understand privacy, and how that all plays out when they’re in an online space?”
• Teachers should be trusted. “If the technology fails us and filters something appropriate and useful, and if teachers in their professional judgment think it’s appropriate, they should be able to show it,” she said. “Teachers need to impose their professional judgment on materials that are available to their students.”

Screenshot

Fourteen year-old Adora Svitak wishes that Facebook came up with a popup window that read, “Are you going to regret this later?” before allowing people to post their updates.

It’s that kind of long-term vision that’s missing from a lot of how kids act and how they’re being educated about using social media. And because adults are navigating the same uncharted waters alongside — or in many cases, far behind — their kids, sometimes using what’s considered common sense at the time might not even be enough of a filter.

Svitak is already a fairly savvy social media user herself, having launched her own Facebook brand, website, and even TED talks. She and her peers are pushing boundaries on sites like Tumblr, posting videos on YouTube and creating their own blogs — and getting a lot of traction.

Cases in point: Teenager Rebecca Black’s Friday, last year’s viral YouTube music video (more than 32 million views) and the Kony 2012 video, whose 90 million views was propelled by kids passing it along to each other.

“We can have tremendous influence on the cultural landscape,” Svitak said at the recent Big Tent event in San Jose. “We are co-creators of the world we live in. We’re not just watching the screen in front of us. Whether it’s good or bad, you can’t argue it’s influential.”

She’s got a point there — kids’ influence can be powerful, especially with the help of social media sites like YouTube and Twitter. But unlike the kids who create the content that goes on those sites, the companies that host the content are forced to weigh in on whether it’s “good” or “bad,” or more pointedly, what they should do about it.

Victoria Grand, director of communications and policy at YouTube, said company staff is constantly searching for questionable content and deciding what action to take. For example, a spate of videos created by girls who ask the viewing public, “Am I pretty or ugly,” have been circulating for about four years, and YouTube must contend with whether, as a private company, it should take action to remove the videos.

“Is this a disturbing teenage trend? Should a private company take away the right of a girl to ask the world if she’s pretty? Is this hate speech territory? Do we make it go away?” she said, listing the litany of questions the company must contend with each day. The answer is not always clear. After some investigation, Grand said one of the girls posting the “Am I pretty or ugly” video was a 21-year-old art student embarking on an art project.

Other examples: the cinnamon challenge, whereby people upload videos of themselves eating a spoon full of cinnamon, and their subsequent reactions, which are, as Grand puts it “just repulsive.” So far, 30,000 such YouTube videos have been tagged, and Grand said YouTube has been contacted by physicians imploring the company to take those videos down because eating raw cinnamon can be bad for the respiratory system. The question, again, YouTube must contend with: How dangerous is this?

And what should YouTube do about what Grand calls “self-injury videos,” especially those that show girls cutting themselves? “The cutting videos are really interesting,” Grand said. “In large part, they’re public service announcements by fellow teenagers. They’re saying, ‘Don’t do it,’ or they’re documenting it in a neutral way that says, ‘This is what’s happening.’ Only a fraction is promoting self injury.”

In that light, Grand said the videos reflect authentic voices that can be helpful to other girls considering cutting themselves. At the same time, though, she said “the very act of cutting triggers additional trigger.”

Kony 2012 video that went viral.

The same premise applies to videos showing people smoking. YouTube has been asked to remove videos of people smoking, because “when you see images of people smoking, it leads to more smoking,” Grand said.

Though companies can — and in some cases, should — edit online content that might lead to dangerous behavior, the more proactive approach is educating kids about possible dangers, said Amanda Lenhart, a senior research specialist at the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, where she directs research on young adults, teens, children and families. These are global companies with a reach that goes far and wide, and it could be impossible to manage these issues on a global scale.

“There’s certainly a side of it [that can be approached with] advocacy and work with kids,” she said. “On the other hand, we have to protect free speech. Those are the real tensions behind the debate.”

Educating kids about the issues underlying the content is what Lenhart calls the “middle ground.”

“It can be incredibly localized,” she said. “It starts at the user, and it doesn’t require tech innovation or regulation. But it requires a lot of work on the part of parents and end users.”

But as Svitak pointed out, though kids’ influence is powerful, especially with the help of the vast online megaphone, kids don’t always understand the repercussions of their online behavior. And because this is still very much new territory for a lot of adults, education around these issues doesn’t always flow from parent to child. In that case, who’s teaching whom? And what are the appropriate models?

For its part, YouTube wants to draw youth to teach youth about these issues, Grand said.

“But it’s like feeding people spinach,” she said. “How do you rally youth around issues like flagging inappropriate content and privacy controls? It’s hard… They have a limited attention span. We have breakthroughs sometimes with the teen safety community, but those blog posts don’t get nearly enough awareness. It’s hard to cut through the noise.”

Technology can actually help is this realm — at least to some extent. For the “Am I Ugly” videos, images can be blurred, and comment settings can be adjusted to protect kids. The “safety mode” scans videos for fleshtones, she said, but as a result, videos of babies are deleted. And what happens to artistic videos that include nudity?

“People say we should come up with some kind of predictive algorithm: ‘You’re Google — figure it out!’” she said. “But algorithms can’t do most of this work. With things like nudity, algorithm doesn’t know if it’s surgery, or if it’s a breast cancer announcement.”

YouTube does organize videos for review, and those that rank high on flesh tones will be reviewed faster by YouTube staff. And factors like the flagger’s reputation, the number of times the video has been flagged, how “hot” it is in terms of virality, all help YouTube prioritize review of the algorithm.

“But humans need to see it,” she said. And that takes time.

THE STOVE APPROACH

Fourteen-year-old Svitak offers some advice to adults: think long-term. At her school, she says all devices must be turned off — no blogs, no email, and no access to websites.

“This is a short-term approach,” she said, adding that she prefers the “touch-the-stove approach.” When she was younger, she learned quickly to stay away from the stove after she touched it — but in her effort to exert independence and push boundaries, she didn’t get badly burned.

“If you never teach the child to cross the street, they won’t know how to do it,” she said. “We need to emphasize the long-term approach with education — not just block everything, but teach kids how to evaluate. Then they won’t post inappropriate content.”

Innovation in ISD

No longer afraid of giving kids access to the Internet, a growing number of school districts are developing digital media policies that emphasize responsibility over fear.

By Heather Chaplin

Since early 2001, every school accepting federal funding for discounted Internet access through the government’s E-rate program had to do two things – block “harmful” sites and create an Acceptable Use Policy.

The mantra of schools back then was pretty simple: Keep it out. The standard approach to this government mandate, the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA), was to build the equivalent of walls, fences, and moats to keep kids from the web.

“It’s a historical hiccup in the history of learning,” said Rich Halverson, a learning scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the lead researcher on KidGrid, a mobile app that helps teachers study and analyze student data. “Here we had the most sophisticated advances in the history of learning banned from schools out of fear.”

Fear was definitely the word you heard when talking to school administrators – no doubt partly because in the age of the Internet, 2001 was a long time ago, and the Web was still unknown territory for plenty of people back then. Also, all it takes is one student downloading pornography and sending it around the school, or one case of sexting that makes it in the news, for a school to find itself in serious hot water.

But recently – in the last two or three years – something has changed. Schools seem to be getting over their fears and want to bring the Web and social media and all the attendant digital tools into the classroom. You can see this change reflected in a slew of new Acceptable Use Policies (AUPs) across the country that emphasize responsibility over mere acceptance and the implementation of school-wide blogs and even the distribution of smartphones for classroom use.

“This isn’t happening in the majority of schools,” said Jim Bosco, principal investigator at the Consortium of School Networking’s Participatory Learning in Schools initiative. “But it’s not the rarity anymore, either.”

Bosco said that while he had no empirical data to track these changes in schools, he estimated that between 40 and 50 percent of school districts were developing more forward-thinking policies. The Consortium of School Networking (CoSN) is working with school leaders from 13 districts to collaborate on creating models for district-level digital media use policies in K-12 education.

COSN released a paper this month called “Making Progress: Rethinking State and School District Policies Concerning Mobile Technologies and Social Media.”

“The advantages of digital media now greatly outweigh the disadvantages and require that schools update their thinking and policies to provide guidance on the use of these tools to improve student learning and achievement,” the paper says.

It simply makes no sense, the paper argues, to try and keep students out of a world – a digital world – that is going to be paramount to how they live and work as adults. In fact, says Bosco, it’s not even possible to keep them out.

“You can build as big a moat as you want,” he said. “But it’s not going to work if for no other reason than they go home at night. A lot of people say, well, what they do when they get home is not my problem. But I think that seems borderline unethical.”

According to Bosco, administrators at schools ought to be providing safe environments for students to learn how to be responsible digital citizens – not just protecting themselves from lawsuits by keeping the Internet out of the classroom and leaving kids to flail about when they go home.

“One of the most powerful reasons to permit the use of social media and mobile devices in the classroom is to provide an opportunity for students to learn about their use in a supervised environment that emphasizes the development of attitudes and skills that will help keep them safe outside of school,” the CoSN paper reads.

The Children’s Internet Protection Act requires Internet filters, but the changing thinking over the last two or three years is that maybe those “filters” aren’t best enforced by draconian AUPs.

“When I talk to colleagues in Finland, they say, how do you filter?” said Jim Klein, director of Information Services and Technology at the Saugus Union School District in Southern California. “They say, our kids’ filters are in their heads. You do this by giving them a safe environment to educate themselves instead of sticking your head in the sand and pretending these technologies don’t exist.”

This doesn’t mean that students in Klein’s district have unfettered access to anything online. But Klein has a different approach to blocking. Instead of buying a commercial filter that blocks URLs, Klein, who uses only open source software, has created filters based on content. This means YouTube, for example, is available as a site, but a particular page – pornographic or hate-based – won’t be.

Klein also said that when he’s building filters, he doesn’t work with the mindset of keeping out every kid who desperately wants to get around them – those kids are going to get access anyway, he said, whether by breaking through the filter or waiting until they go home. Rather, he sets out to prevent students from accidentally stumbling on something harmful or upsetting.

“You have to understand the purpose of filters,” he said, “and change your assumptions about what you’re doing.”

When Klein was loosening the filter system, he spent a lot of time talking to teachers about what he was doing and why. Teachers have to be responsible for what happens in their classroom, Klein said. And the expectation has to be that students are responsible for their own behavior. His message of responsibility is echoed by the new CoSN paper and by other forward-thinking tech administrators at districts around the country.

DISTRICTS FIGURING IT OUT

The Katy Independent School District in Texas recently changed its AUP to focus on “responsible use,” said Darlene Rankin, director of instructional technology. “Digital responsibility is big.” Rankin said. “We’re teaching students how to operate in this new world. We wanted to change the wording in our guidelines because we don’t want students to accept them; we want students to be responsible for them.”

Do things ever go wrong? Of course. In the Katy ISD, one fifth grader did a search for and found videos of lap dancers. The parents, Rankin said, were irate.

“Things are going to happen,” Rankin said. “We talked to the parents – ultimately it was a great teaching moment.”

Halverson, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said one of the problems schools are now facing over responsible internet use is a legacy of the last 20-plus years of what he called an “accountability squeeze” in the school system. There’s been so much focus on “holding schools accountable” that school administrators have been living in a culture of fear – fear of innovating, fear of trying something that might be messy.

“Research-driven intervention like changing the curriculum or bringing in new textbooks leaves no room for error,” he said, “which is never going to be the case with digital technology. Of course there’s uncertainty and variation in what they’ve been doing – just look at the state of algebra in inner-city schools. But you can certify a textbook. Everyone wants a magic bullet that will solve all problems, but it doesn’t exist. We need to lay off schools and let them innovate.”

Katy ISD has been innovating by distributing Android phones to students. Three years ago, the district gave 150 phones to fifth graders at one elementary school. The next year, it gave out 1,500 phones at 11 schools; and this year, 3,200 students at 18 schools now have Androids.

In the classroom, students log in and receive assignments, take quizzes and do research on their phones. The school has made certain apps available, including an online catalog for the library and reference books. Teachers also plan specific lessons taking advantage of the phones; for example, when students are studying 3-D objects, they watch a video and then take pictures with their phones. Afterwards, they open a drawing program, where they do work based on the image, and then send the work to their teacher.

Katy ISD, like many other districts that embrace mobile technologies and other digital media, uses the social networking platform Edmodo to facilitate online work. Parents can log on to the site to view student grades.

The Inner Grove Heights Community Schools in Minnesota use Edmodo. Two years ago, the district didn’t even have wireless Internet access. But six months later, administrators made the decision to add wireless to all schools, elementary as well as high school.

“Teachers were using digital tools, and we were getting more and more requests to open online sites and make it possible for teachers to, for example, use video from the web in the classroom,” said Lynn Tenney, director of technology for the district.

Now, Inner Grove offers hybrid classes. Students meet three times a week in the classroom, and twice a week they work independently online. One year after implementing the program in standardized 12th grade English, the failure rate dropped from 63 percent to 13 percent, said Deirdre Wells, superintendent of the school district.

Factors other than technology, including a different set of students, could have contributed to the decline. Wells couldn’t put her finger on one specific reason for the extraordinary drop, but she pointed to factors like increased flexibility and freedom, which students loved. Also, she said, struggling students could stay in class those two days a week and get more one-on-one help from the teacher, while the more confident students were off doing their online projects.

“The depth of thought and level of discourse gets much deeper when you add an online environment,” Wells said. The teacher can present information in class, and then the students are free to explore it online – they can look at other students’ work, or check out videos on YouTube. Time constraints are no longer a factor, the process becomes more individualized, and school becomes more relevant, Wells said.

UNDERSTANDING THE SOCIAL ELEMENT

The social aspect is certainly a big factor in these new learning environments. A fourth grader in the Saugus Union School District in Southern California, for example, posted a plea for help on a Saturday, saying he was struggling with his math homework. His math teacher saw the post and, using his own Macbook web cam, made a video of himself explaining the subject in more depth. He put the video online, and by the end of the weekend his post was filled with comments from students chiming in about the work.

For Jim Bosco of CoSN, these advances are absolutely key to providing real educations, not only to the “haves” but to the “have-nots” as well. Bosco grew up in Pittsburg, the child of Italian immigrants. His father had a fourth-grade education, and the Catholic school Bosco attended was less than ideal, he said. But Bosco happened to live within walking distance of a Carnegie public library branch, where he spent much of his free time. He still remembers being struck by the fact that his cousins, who lived 60 miles away in Newcastle, didn’t have access to all that he did by the simple accident of where they lived.

“By being walking distance to that library, I had access to all kinds of information and really to all that human culture had produced,” Bosco said.

The library of his childhood is like the internet today – a repository of “human culture and knowledge.”

“What you have access to has traditionally been determined by money and location,” Bosco said. “But the internet has the potential to change that.”

Getty

Schools that receive discounts for Internet access through the federal E-rate funding are required to implement a number of measures, like creating an Internet safety policy and filtering and blocking access to certain types of online content. To that end, The Children’s Internet Protection Act, CIPA, addresses concerns about the type of online materials that children can access at school.

We’ve written several times about some of the frustration and confusion that CIPA and filtering causes, and we’ve talked to the Department of Education’s Karen Cator for clarification about what the law really requires.

But as more schools begin to implement one-to-one computer programs, providing each student with a laptop or a net-book or even an iPad, there are new wrinkles in thinking about CIPA. After all, these devices are meant to be used at school and at home.

Currently most schools filter their network. There are a number of ways in which they do this, and a number of companies that they turn to for the technology to do so.

But if schools are just filtering the Internet on the premises, what happens when students take their computers home? How do schools monitor or block access to Web sites when students are using their school-provided laptops on their family’s home networks? And are they even required to do so?

Some schools with one-to-one programs have installed filtering software onto the devices they send home. Such is the case beginning this year for the laptops that are distributed to students in Casper, Wyoming’s Natrona County School District. The school district has had a one-to-one program for a number of years. In the past, the permission slips that went home with the devices at the beginning of the school year made certain that parents were aware that the devices had no filtering software installed. Parents had to sign that they “accept full responsibility for supervision when my child’s Internet use is not in a school setting.”

But the school district has opted this year to expand its filtering efforts by adding social networking sites to the list of blocked sites, and by installing filtering software directly onto every Apple laptop that each 6th- through 12th-grader receives. That means that when those district-owned computers are at home, the filtering is still in place.

According to Mark Antrim, Associate Superintendent for Facilities and Technology, the change in the way in which Natrona County School District handles its filtering was largely a response to parents’ concerns about what their children were doing on the Internet at home.

But are schools actually required to install filtering on computing devices that head home?

While CIPA does make it clear about the requirements to filter the Internet at schools and at libraries, it’s not clear if this applies to the computers themselves. If schools are paying for 3G connectivity on these devices, then yes, CIPA applies. Otherwise “it’s a gray area,” a spokesperson from the FCC told me. The agency is working on clarifying how the rules on filtering apply in these sorts of cases.

It’s going to be an increasingly important issue that the FCC tackles, particularly as one-to-one programs proliferate. As it currently stands, different schools are adopting different approaches to filtering on one-to-one devices, some opting to install software on the devices, others leaving it up to parents to monitor what kids do when they’re using the computers at home.

We’d love to hear from readers what policies come with their take-home devices.

Flickr:www_ukberri_net

Teachers who have been frustrated over blocked access to YouTube educational videos in school can take heart. YouTube is rolling out a pilot a program with schools that will redirect all YouTube links to educational content on YouTube.com/education. In addition, comments will be disabled and related videos will only be educational, both of which are a source of anxiety around exposing kids to inappropriate content.

Each school and district has a different kind of filtering system, but this workaround allows schools that block YouTube at the domain level to access it through YouTube.com/education, according to Angela Lin, head of YouTube Edu. Schools interested in participating in the pilot program can sign up at YouTube.com/t/education.

YouTube plans to add hundreds of thousands of more educational videos onto the /edu site (which was launched two years ago), including videos from the Museum of Modern Art, BBC Earth, the Smithsonian, Big Think, and many more. Until now, most of the content on /edu has revolved around higher education, with lectures from MIT, UCLA, U.C. Berkeley and other universities (with the very notable exception of the Khan Academy videos, which are aimed at K-12). Newly added content will be focused more on K-12 curriculum, as well as post-college content — what’s referred to as “lifelong learning.”

“We recognize there is demand for educational video, and we’re trying to provide access to it, as well as catalyze content creation,” Lin said.”Ultimately we need to give educators and administrators the tools and resources they need and have them decide what’s best for their students.”

Solving the access issue, adding more educational content, and launching the YouTube Teachers site a few weeks ago are all part of the world’s largest video site’s foray into the education space.

A “handful of school” across the country have signed up for the pilot program, Lin said. “As with anything at Google, this is iterative. We want to get the product right, the experience right. Any change can be onerous at schools that are already tight for time and resources,” she said. “We’re trying to enable more content creators and users to think about us as an educational platform.”

Read more about blocked Web sites and facts about what filtering policies.

Larry Gonzalez

I’m at a small gathering of education journalists, policymakers and school leaders today, and in attendance is the Department of Education’s Director of Education Technology, Karen Cator.

Cator told me that teachers continue to thank her for outlining these important clarifications about schools blocking access to Web sites. For those who haven’t seen the original article, which followed an article about surprising blocked Web sites, here it is again.

Cator parsed the rules of the Childrens Internet Protection Act, and provided guidance for teachers on how to proceed when it comes to interpreting the rules. To that end, here are six surprising rules that educators, administrators, parents and students might not know about website filtering in schools.

1. Accessing YouTube is not violating CIPA rules. “Absolutely it’s not circumventing the rules,” Cator says. “The rule is to block inappropriate sites. All sorts of YouTube videos are helpful in explaining complex concepts or telling a story, or for hearing an expert or an authentic voice — they present learning opportunities that are really helpful.”
2. Websites don’t have to be blocked for teachers. “Some of the comments I saw online had to do with teachers wondering why they can’t access these sites,” she says. “They absolutely can. There’s nothing that says that sites have to be blocked for adults.”
3. Broad filters are not helpful. “What we have had is what I consider brute force technologies that shut down wide swaths of the Internet, like all of YouTube, for example. Or they may shut down anything that has anything to do with social media, or anything that is a game,” she said. “These broad filters aren’t actually very helpful, because we need much more nuanced filtering.”
4. Schools will not lose E-rate funding by unblocking appropriate sites. Cator said she’s never heard of a school losing E-rate funding due to allowing appropriate sites blocked by filters. See the excerpt below from the National Education Technology Plan, approved by officials who dictate E-rate rules.
5. Kids need to be taught how to be responsible digital citizens. “[We need to] address the topic at school or home in the form of education,” Cator says. “How do we educate this generation of young people to be safe online, to be secure online, to protect their personal information, to understand privacy, and how that all plays out when they’re in an online space?”
6. Teachers should be trusted. “If the technology fails us and filters something appropriate and useful, and if teachers in their professional judgment think it’s appropriate, they should be able to show it,” she said. “Teachers need to impose their professional judgment on materials that are available to their students.”

Here’s the full transcript of my Q&A with Karen Cator.

Q. Please describe what CIPA does and does not mandate.

A. CIPA does require that any school that funds Internet access or their internal network connections with E-rate has to implement filters to block students’ access to content that could be harmful to minors.

The best way of thinking about this whole topic is in terms of “rules, tools and schools.”
There are rules in place for a good reason. CIPA does require that we block or filter inappropriate sites, but if sites are found that are deemed appropriate they can be unblocked. So having the process in place for unblocking sites is definitely important.

Q. Is it illegal for teachers to access these sites, too?

A. These sites don’t have to be blocked for teachers. Some of the comments I saw online had to do with teachers wondering why they can’t access these sites. They absolutely can. There’s nothing that says that sites have to be blocked for adults.

Rules are in place to attempt to protect minors form inappropriate materials. We also need school-based rules –  usually in the form of acceptable use policies that students sign that say, “I will use this computer or access the Internet, and I agree to abide by rules in my school.” Sometimes it will say that if you come across something inappropriate that you shut it down immediately and tell an adult.

The second way to address this topic is by thinking about tools. These are technology tools that are put in place to filter sites that are inappropriate. These filters are getting better and better. What we have had is what I consider brute force technologies that shut down wide swaths of the Internet, like all of YouTube, for example. Or they may shut down anything that has anything to do with social media, or anything that is a game. These broad filters aren’t actually very helpful, because we need much more nuanced filtering. Better filters would be incredibly helpful.

The third way to address the topic is at school or home in the form of education.
How do we educate this generation of young people to be safe online, to be secure online, to protect their personal information, to understand privacy, and how that all plays out when they’re in an online space. We also want students to be nice to each other, and not to engage in bullying, in an online space where their voice is amplified and persistent. We want students to grow up to be good digital citizen.

So there are rules that are in place, the technology tools in the form of more intelligent filters, and then it is an absolute necessity to provide good digital education for this generation of students. And that requires providing professional development for adults working with these students.

Q. Just to be clear, are schools or teachers circumventing rules if they show YouTube videos or other blocked sites to students?

A. Absolutely it’s not circumventing the rules. The rule is to block inappropriate sites. If the technology fails us and filters something appropriate and useful, and if teachers in their professional judgment think it’s appropriate, they should be able to show it. Teachers need to impose their professional judgment on materials that are available to their students.

All sorts of YouTube videos are helpful in explaining complex concepts or telling a story, or for hearing an expert or an authentic voice — they present learning opportunities that are really helpful.

If a filtering system is not intelligent enough to sort sites out, then the teacher is the next best one to do so. If a site is blocked for a teacher, then the I.T. person can unblock it if that’s the way the network is set up.

From the DOE’s National Education Technology Plan:

Balancing Connectivity and Student Safety on the Internet

E-Rate is a federal program that supports connectivity in elementary and secondary schools and libraries by providing discounts on Internet access, telecommunications services, internal network connections, and basic maintenance. Schools, school districts, and consortia can receive discounts on these services ranging from 20 to 90 percent depending on their level of poverty and geographic location.

Schools’ eligibility for E-Rate money is contingent on compliance with several federal laws designed to ensure student privacy and safety on the Internet. The Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA) requires any school that funds Internet access or internal network connections with E-Rate money to implement filters that block students’ access to content that may be harmful to minors, including obscenity and pornography. CIPA also requires schools receiving E-Rate discounts to teach online safety to students and to monitor their online activities.

Ensuring student safety on the Internet is a critical concern, but many filters designed to protect students also block access to legitimate learning content and such tools as blogs, wikis, and social networks that have the potential to support student learning and engagement. More flexible, intelligent filtering systems can give teachers (to whom CIPA restrictions do not apply) access to educationally valuable content. On the other end of the spectrum, some schools and districts filter students’ online activities with proxy servers that meet CIPA requirements but are easy to get around, minimizing their utility for managing and monitoring students’ online activity.

CIPA also has posed challenges to accessing school networks through students’ own cell phones, laptop computers, and other Internet access devices to support learning activities when schools cannot afford to purchase devices for each student. Applying CIPA-required network filters to a variety of student-owned devices is a technical challenge that may take schools months or years to implement. However, districts such as Florida’s Escambia County Schools have created technical solutions and accompanying acceptable use policies (AUPs) that comply with CIPA regulations, allowing Web-based learning on student devices to run on networks supported by federal E-Rate funding.

Source: Universal Service Administrative Company 2008.